Handheld electronic devices are increasingly popular as a result of their reduced size and weight. Advances in microelectronics and battery technology have permitted the functionality of such devices to approach that of personal computers. As the functionality of handheld electronic devices grows, so do the demands of the graphical user interfaces of applications executing thereon in order to provide users access to this functionality. In addition, such applications use multimedia components to provide, among other things, a more intuitive graphical user interface with which the user interacts to access the functionality.
These multimedia components typically include the animation of two and three-dimensional graphical objects. The animation of such two and three-dimensional graphical objects is known in the art. The objects are rendered repeatedly via an output interface, such as a display, over a period of time. Generally, the objects undergo transformations between successive renderings.
A number of graphical languages exist that permit the specification of a graphical object for display and any transformations to be applied to the graphical object. The graphical objects are typically characterized by relative or initial absolute coordinates or vectors. These coordinates or vectors often correspond to the vertices of the graphical object.
Transformations can include, but are not limited to, movement (including change of position and rotation), scaling and skew of the graphical object in the plane. Other transformations include, but are not limited to, color and transparency transformations. Where a three-dimensional graphical object is being rendered, the vertices of the graphical object are projected onto the two-dimensional plane of the display.
In some cases, a rendered graphical object is distorted or otherwise inaccurately represented due to errors introduced during the calculation of the transformation applied to the graphical object. These errors can result from the determination of trigonometric values. Trigonometric values are used for translations that include a rotation and are interpolated using a table of pre-determined trigonometric values. The size of error can vary depending on the number of pre-determined trigonometric values provided in the table.